The superb British actor Alan Rickman, star of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Sense and Sensibility, makes his directorial debut with The Winter Guest, a meditation on life, death and human relations that is as elusive as it is fascinating. It’s the kind of film that turns over in the mind,…
Thursday January 15 Voice of America: There’s something mighty special that differentiates a cowboy poet from all other bards–call it rugged individualism or manifest destiny, but it all boils down to a kind of agrarian authenticity. It won’t be hard to imagine campfire smoke wafting in the background when the…
New York-based artist and author Art Spiegelman is among the most important contemporary cartoonists in the world. And his considerable fame is based almost wholly on Maus, a sometimes hard-bound comic book first published in 1986 by Pantheon Books. It’s no exaggeration to say that Maus is a masterpiece. The…
British playwright Harold Pinter once confessed that his ear for dialogue is something of an acquired talent: He gleans some of his material from conversations overheard in bars and restaurants. In that respect, he’s not much different from many other playwrights. However, what distinguishes Pinter from the horde of minutiae-obsessed…
The overwhelming success of the Broadway tap-dance extravaganza, Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk might disappoint, dismay or even shock some musical-theater purists: There’s no Fred Astaire clone as the show’s main character. Instead, the unorthodox musical offers us an abstraction–a solitary dancer known only as “‘da Beat”–as…
Does Robert De Niro presume to play free safety for the Jets? Can Denzel Washington slam dunk over Dikembe Mutombo? Well, no. But if Dennis Rodman gets a notion to do King Lear, better break out the swords. Because ever since Sonja Henie and her skates signed with Darryl F…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience: It’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals and costumes. The film is about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese…
After watching Hard Rain, all but the most intrepid humans and whatever ducks are in the audience will probably feel like changing into dry clothes and curling up in front of the fire with a cup of hot bouillon. This has got to be the wettest movie in memory–wetter than…
Thursday January 8 Dear old Dodd: Director and playwright Terry Dodd knows it better than just about anyone else: “The World’s a Stage,” and to paraphrase someone more famous than Dodd, we’re the ones putting on a show. That’s the name of the talk Dodd will give this evening as…
Mark Sink is both a prominent Denver photographer and a member of a prominent local family. That explains why he’s a tuxedo-clad semi-regular on the society pages of the city’s dailies, typically seen in photographs with one or the other of his divorced parents. His father is Chuck Sink, an…
“Get yourself some puppets, put ’em on ice skates, and you’ll be a millionaire,” laments one character in the Avenue Theater’s interactive murder mystery Murder Most Fowl, a nine-year-old production that annually lampoons local celebrities and events. At a recent performance of the show, that line drew gentle laughter and…
Why does Denver need yet another theater company? What can a new group producing plays in a downtown storefront theater offer us that older, more established theaters aren’t already providing? People once asked those same questions about Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, formed during the Seventies by a handful of students…
Optimists confident that Prime Minister Tony Blair and Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams would simply sit down to tea last month at 10 Downing Street and toss eight centuries of strife into history’s dustbin have another think coming. Last week, Irish nationalists inside notorious Maze Prison gunned down Billy Wright,…
It’s the New Woody Allen Movie. In capital letters. And even when the old clarinetist is playing slightly out of tune, as he is in Deconstructing Harry, it doesn’t make so much difference. Faithful as the Earth circling the sun, Allen’s comedies of anxiety keep on coming, one per year…
While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films came out, 1997 was a loser. If you factor in the number of films that brought fresh talents and fresh…
Thursday January 1 Strauss relief: In the past, the only place one could possibly experience the Vienna Philharmonic’s traditional Neujahrkonzert was in Vienna–or sitting in front of the tube, where the New Year’s Day fete is televised yearly. Not the same, is it? Now, thanks to the efforts of Toronto…
Contemporary playwrights face the same nagging question each time they write a script: Should it be a comedy, a tragedy or a dogmatic disaster-documentary? The latter is mostly the accepted province of Hollywood, and the only form of tragedy that seems to bubble up to the surface these days is…
Last year 28 of America’s regional theaters presented A.R. Gurney’s comedy Sylvia, giving it the dubious distinction of being the most-produced play of the professional theater season apart from holiday regulars such as A Christmas Carol. There’s an obvious reason: Despite some of Gurney’s off-the-cuff remarks about politics, self-help gurus…
Kevin Costner’s last outing as director/star, Dances With Wolves, nabbed Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, but his post-apocalyptic followup, The Postman, is too standard-issue to impress even the resolutely middlebrow minds of Academy voters. Nor is it likely to please audiences. Call it what you will–Waterworld…
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
When first we see Melvin Udall, middle-aged misanthrope, he’s stuffing his neighbor’s pesky little dog into the garbage chute of their Manhattan apartment building. That’s perfection. Melvin, we soon learn, is nasty by reflex–a selfish, acid-tongued homophobe who has no use for Jews, blacks, children, women or anybody else who…
Imagine Macaulay Culkin as a three-inch rodent with no personality, and you’ve pretty much nailed the thing. Mouse Hunt, the third movie to be released by DreamWorks Pictures, is Home Alone boiled down to grim, humorless destruction, with a nameless mouse as the tormentor. Seen another way, it’s Tom and…
